


i want to say i'm sorry for things i haven't done yet

by heelturn2



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Not Beta Read, Oneshot, Pre-Canon, horse girl is a gender neutral term, laurence is a rich boy prick, ludwig is a horse girl that puts up with far too much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 01:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28591866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heelturn2/pseuds/heelturn2
Summary: In a brief moment of respite in their formative years at Byrgenwerth, Laurence wants to show Ludwig something special.
Relationships: Laurence/Ludwig (Bloodborne)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	i want to say i'm sorry for things i haven't done yet

Byrgenwerth, hardly short of a living thing, laid at the very center of a densely-woven web of secrecy, hidden easily from the outside world with a thick shroud of forestry on one side and vast waters lined with mountain ranges on the other. In its own way, it was another world, and on occasion, on late nights like this one, it even looked like one; cool stone bathed in hazy tones of blue beneath the waxing moon’s lidded eye. It would be completely opened in a few days’ time, round and beaming white over the campus, but by then, Laurence and Ludwig would be far away from the alcove in which Byrgenwerth lied.

Laurence pressed a bony shoulder up against the heavy door that led to the courtyard and pushed, and it creaked lazily open beneath his full weight. As soon as a big enough opening was made for his narrow frame to fit, he slipped through and disappeared behind the door. Ludwig pushed the door open wide enough to let himself through and followed close behind, ducking down to avoid the top of the doorframe.

On the other side, Laurence was turned to watch Ludwig squeezing through, with one hand on his cane and the other covering his snickering mouth.

“Quiet,” Ludwig spoke lowly as he pulled himself through, easing the door softly shut behind him to not shake the whole damned university awake with its weight.

“Do forgive me, I can’t help it.” Laurence came forwards, extending out a hand for Ludwig to hold. Ludwig took it, and Laurence walked them off the paved footpath and into the dewy grass, through a lightly-trodden path leading behind the university. “You know I adore you and all of your…” he waved his hand, gesturing to all of Ludwig as he racked his mind for the right word, “...attributes, Ludwig, but you’re built for many things — fighting, horseback riding, reaching high things for me, so on — and stealth isn’t one of them, I’m afraid. It’s like trying to lead a horse through a library.”

Ludwig huffed through his nose. “As though _you_ are, you little _twit_. Size means nothing when I can still hear your cane and your little dress shoes from a mile away, clacking around like you own the place. You might as well wear a bell.”

Laurence chuckled again. “Oh, you wound me, implying I _don’t_ own the place. I could never anticipate such harsh words from my _alter idem_.”

 _Quoting Latin. What a prick._ Ludwig thought with no small amount of fondness, but did not say.“Perhaps you should expect such a thing. It doesn’t seem anyone else is much able to tell you no. I hardly am, myself.” He said instead. Playing into Laurence’s hunger for praise was easy, and it got the desired result every time he tried it, without fail.

Like clockwork, Laurence ducked his head to hide his smile, without a hint of insincerity. “There’s the Ludwig I know.”

After that, they walked in a comfortable silence.

The grounds of the university were vast, fit for a place of learning as prestigious as Byrgenwerth could boast, and utterly isolated. It was only a matter of iron fencing separate from a dense forest, strictly off-limits to students and faculty alike, and beyond that, a poor town hardly worth mentioning at all. Ludwig had never put much thought to it — he was quite used to life in such a place, as all his life up to his Byrgenwerth enrollment was lived in a manor deep in the countryside — but lifting his head from staring at the shimmering grass and being met with little but the reaching spider-arms of trees and _dark,_ he began to understand why succumbing to cabin fever wasn’t unheard of among the student body.

The trail they followed didn’t seem intended to be traversed at all, tucked behind the main building with only a faint path of lightly trampled grass to give any sense of direction. Laurence seemed to know where he was going with an easy assuredness in his movements, however, weaving them between trees like he’d done it a hundred times before, and it quickly eased any scant worries Ludwig had about getting lost. Only one of many worries he had, but it was a weight off his shoulders nonetheless. With his head ducked down to avoid any low-hanging branches, Ludwig followed the smaller man’s lead through the thicket dutifully.

The grounds of Byrgenwerth were completely uninhabited, eerily so, besides the two of them, and a terribly inconvenient but thankfully temporary curfew was to blame. There was no official word on what the purpose nor cause of it was (not that that was particularly surprising; Master Willem seemed to prefer keeping the student body in the dark whenever possible, and in dim light at best if absolute pitch wasn’t an option), but Ludwig had heard from a girl in his class that a freshman released some sort of live specimen from a biology course into the halls, which took until morning to locate and recapture, forcing Willem to put in place a curfew until further notice.

Ludwig was never one for gossip, but he really had no reason not to believe it. Even if he _did_ have doubts, he knew that Willem would not so easily give a clear answer if he were to ask the rumor’s veracity outright, especially if it were true; the provost would never lend credence to any rumor that suggested he was capable of incompetence.

No matter, Laurence would be caught dead before he’d let their good time be cut short by something so trivial. The night was still young, and Laurence had been hounding him about what he had planned since they’d gotten up that morning. In fact, the expansive campus being empty save for them did little but spur Laurence along, though Ludwig couldn’t parse exactly why. He guessed it had to do with the thrill of potentially being caught.

Not that anything could befall Laurence if they were; no matter their recent disagreements, the provost hadn’t the heart to punish him. Ludwig was another matter, which he realized gravely and all too late.

Despite himself, the anxiety gnawing at the back of his mind got the best of him. He spoke, more nervously than he’d wished, before his mind had the time to measure his tone. “Don’t you think that we’re risking a bit much by coming out here, Laurence? And during a curfew, no less.”

Laurence came to a slow stop and turned to face Ludwig, freeing the hand that was holding Ludwig’s to wave it dismissively. “Nonsense, Ludwig, we’ve already come so far. I thought you were above such cowardice. What happened to the brave man I know?” Laurence jabbed Ludwig in the chest with two fingers. Ludwig only scoffed in return. A minute twitch of Laurence’s lip on his otherwise stony face, noticeable even in the dim moonlight, betrayed his disappointment.

Deciphering Laurence’s expressions, or lack thereof, was a careful art, and one that Ludwig was a master of. He had to be, he thought; he adored the little scholar, but he couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to deal with him without possessing such a skill. He wondered if Laurence knew just how lucky he was to have him as a roommate; nearly any other man would strangle him and leave him in the lake within his first week.

“If it’s punishment you’re so worried about, if we _were_ to be caught — which we won’t be — nothing will come of you. The headmasters like me too much to do anything to either of us, you’ll get a proverbial rap across the knuckles at worst.” Laurence justified, and waited an expectant moment longer.

Ludwig held his tongue, lips pressed together firmly.

“That’s what I thought.” Laurence grabbed Ludwig’s hand again, shook his cane free of the dirt it had sunken into, and continued walking along his path, as though nothing had happened at all.

It wasn’t long before they exited into a clearing, littered with small sheds and, at its center, a greenhouse, made of glass too foggy to see within. Laurence searched his overcoat’s pockets for a moment, and quickly found what he was looking for, which he presented to Ludwig proudly: a key, shining silver and overly ornate for its rather little use, with ornate winding engravings along the shank and a moon shape at the bow.

“Where did you get that?” Ludwig asked.

Laurence kept his mouth shut, but gave Ludwig a knowing glance and a wry smile.

“What a surprise.” Ludwig grumbled, warmer in his tone than he’d liked.

Laurence searched for the keyhole with his fingers, and unlocked the door as soon as he found it. The door pushed open with a click, and Laurence stepped aside for Ludwig to go ahead first.

Inside, the greenhouse was filled — crowded, almost, too small a structure to account for the growth of its contents — with massive white-petaled flowers, some at its center reaching nearly to the ceiling. Ludwig entered further, mouth agape, and Laurence followed close behind, shutting the door carefully behind them. The closer Ludwig got to the flowers, the clearer it was that their petals were giving off a faint bluish glow in the pale moonlight. Cautiously, he reached out and ran his fingers along a petal of the flower closest to him, looming just over his head. By the massive flowers’ stems, at their feet, were even more of the same kind, vines winding around one another in a thick tangle of greenery with huge leaves reaching out like feelers. Ludwig swore that he could feel the flower pulse beneath his fingers.

Laurence stepped up next to Ludwig quietly, careful not to catch any flowers underfoot, and set his cane aside against a wall, bracing his weight on Ludwig’s arm instead. The plants swayed in a nonexistent breeze, like they recognized his presence.

“What you see before you started as only a few specimens, a matter of months ago. We’ve been studying them quite closely in my botany class. We haven’t quite begun to truly understand them, but it seems as though their patterns follow the moon’s. Bloom when the moon is at its fullest, glow when the moon is in sight, and so on. Which is _odd_ , as they found them in a cave structure very far underground, yet, they behaved nearly the same as they do here, with the moon right above them.”

Ludwig looked up; he hadn’t noticed before, but the moon _was_ right above them, clear even though the fogged glass and vine-wound metal structuring.

” _Selenanthus_ , I think they wanted to call it, if they ever wanted to make their discoveries known.” Laurence continued.

“With a heavy _‘if’_. Very doubtful.” Ludwig responded, knowing that it was exactly what Laurence wanted to hear.

Laurence’s face lit up, he could tell even only seeing him out of the corner of his eye, and Ludwig couldn’t help but smile. “Precisely. But you know how Willem and his retinue adore dealing in hypotheticals.” He huffed, lacing his fingers together. “Maria is their primary caretaker, these days. She’s taken to affectionately calling them lumenflowers, which I like much more.”

”Lumenflowers,” Ludwig repeated under his breath.

After a long moment of quiet, Ludwig turned from the lumenflowers to look at Laurence, expecting to see him looking at them as well; instead, he was looking back up at him with wide, searching eyes.

“Do you like it?” Laurence broke the silence, with a rare shaking anxiety in his voice. He continued before Ludwig could answer him. “I’m afraid this isn’t the flowers at their full potential. I would have brought you here on the full moon, if I could have — a blue moon, even better — but the two of us have our hands full so often with other things, and we have the hamlet trip coming up, and I only wanted to show you something that I know you could appreciate, I mean, _really, truly_ appreciate, more than any of those —”

Ludwig captured Laurence’s gesturing hands in his own, dwarfing them in his embrace. Laurence looked up at Ludwig with his big deer eyes, his eyebrows knit in confusion and lips tightly shut. “It’s wonderful, Laurence, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Thank you for bringing me here, truly.” He spoke, slowly and quietly, face so close to Laurence’s that their foreheads were nearly pressed together. Sometimes, that was the only way to get him to listen to him. “I love you more than I think I can make you understand, but I will do my best to make sure you know it. No matter how much I must do.”

Laurence looked at him, wide-eyed and almost disbelieving, for a long moment, and Ludwig could practically watch the gears turn in his mind. Ludwig smiled, and Laurence pulled his hands free from Ludwig’s hold to throw his arms over Ludwig’s shoulders and pull him down into a kiss.

For once in his life, Laurence didn’t say a word. Ludwig knew exactly what he meant.

The lumenflowers sighed around them, swaying in time. For a fleeting moment, when they finally pulled away, Ludwig was sure that he could see tiny wisps of moonlight dancing in Laurence’s hair.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first work for bloodborne, and in general! i hope that you enjoyed it!
> 
> i know that this isn't as good as it could be, the ending especially, but i just wanted to be finished fiddling with it. i have not slept. god help me
> 
> also i have a fic planned and in progress going into detail about byrgenwerth's expedition into the fishing hamlet, as mentioned a couple of times throughout, but it's far too ambitious and even i don't know if it'll ever see the light of day. we'll just have to see!
> 
> quick side notes:  
> \- the latin term laurence calls ludwig, alter idem, means second self, used to refer to a friend that is so close that they're the same person/two parts of one whole. historians will say they were friends  
> \- i wrote this with my personal headcanon that byrgenwerth was much larger when it was in order than when you see it in the game, both for ease of writing something that takes place there, and because it doesn't make sense for such an important college to be so.....small  
> \- the freshman that let out the god-knows-what creature to terrorize the halls of byrgenwerth was 100% micolash


End file.
